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Saturday, January 11, 2014

After the storm

Near to my house is the beautiful cove of Abereiddy. The picture above is a stock shot from the Internet - it was probably taken about ten years ago, but that doesn't matter - the important thing is the line of the sea wall and where it joins the headland.

Compare this to the picture I took this morning.

To be fair the sea walls were removed a couple of year ago and the car park has receded a few meters each winter - but the recent storms did the equivalent of ten years' work in a night. There was room for five cars today!

To the south is Newgale, a mile of sands backed with a bank of cobbles. The picture below was taken at Christmas.

The same spot this morning...

It's common for the winter storms to lower the sand, but in twenty years I've never seen it so denuded. A little further down, the petrified trunks of an ancient forest have been exposed for the first time in decades.

Above the usual shoreline, the putative defence is being replaced after the tide had brushed it aside.

And yet today all was calm, as beautiful and wondrous as ever - in some ways more so.

I remember the same thing happening at a favourite beach in Portugal - a little fishing village where my parents once owned an apartment so we went there lots. One May holiday we arrived to find that 50% of the once sandy beach had been reduced to just huge boulders after the winter storms. Quite incredible. Then a year or two later all the sand was back again...I am, though, a little saddened by the loss of some sea stacks in Dorset and the devastation to some other historic town waterfronts in the west country and Cornwall. Those sorts of things can't be replaced.

Crumbs! For some reason I don't get your blog posts via email anymore, yet I'm one of your 'followers', wonder why? Hope you'll soon be able to make sandcastles again. It's the worms I worry about. I like their coiled casts on the beach, like to know they're down there, hanging out in their burrows. x

I wonder why we seem to be so surprised at the power of the weather and the sea? You would think from the tv coverage that we could somehow do something about the storms and the flooding. We need to remember how puny we are!